


With a Vengeance

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Series: What Isn't Broken [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Gen, Hospitals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-06
Updated: 2010-12-06
Packaged: 2017-10-13 13:10:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/137744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sakura is working night shift at the hospital when Naruto brings Sasuke home. Sidefic for "What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed)."</p>
            </blockquote>





	With a Vengeance

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by the 5/31/10 word #141 on the [15_minute_fic](http://community.livejournal.com/15_minute_fic/) livejournal community.

Sakura's working night shift at the hospital this month -- Tsunade's prize apprentice or not, she's still a rookie here, and she's putting in her time on the jobs nobody more senior wants. She walks the rounds every hour, working her way from the top floor down to the emergency room entrance, stopping now and then to scribble a note on a chart or chat for a minute with a patient in too much pain to sleep. The nurses smile at her when she passes, always pleased to see medics treating patients as people rather than cases.

She's back on the top floor when they bring Sasuke in. It doesn't matter. Sometimes she thinks Naruto could make himself heard halfway across Konoha if he wanted to.

"Sakura-chan! Sakura-chan! Hey, somebody find Haruno Sakura! We brought Sasuke home!"

Sakura finds herself down in the emergency room without any idea how she got there, standing at the side of a stretcher with her hands yanking Sasuke's shirt all the way open to expose the deep gash in his left side. "You almost sliced his intestines open," she snarls at Naruto as she shoves the stretcher down the hallway toward an operating room. "What were you thinking? You said you'd bring him home, not that you'd kill him by accident."

"I never said I wouldn't hurt him," Naruto protests, opening a door so she can push the stretcher through. "And you can fix him. Right?"

Sakura aligns the stretcher at the center of a healing array painted on the operating room floor. Then she focuses chakra in her hands, laying her palms against Sasuke's bloody skin. His body is cold despite the warmth of the night and the incipient burn of infection. _Corpse-cold_ , her mind whispers. Sakura stomps the traitorous thought down -- she'll kill Sasuke herself before she lets him die like this -- and coaxes the tainted blood and flesh outward through the wound, delving inward with her mind, checking for ruptures in the coils of his intestines. Sepsis is the last thing they need to deal with now.

"It's gonna be okay, right?" Naruto asks, his voice in her ear and his hand on her shoulder startling Sakura out of her work.

"I can fix his body," she agrees. "But if he fought you this hard, he still doesn't want to come home. How are we supposed to keep him here long enough to fix his heart?"

Naruto falls silent.

Sakura takes the quiet as a gift and submerges herself in her work. She fixes the gaping tear in Sasuke's side, the smaller gashes on his legs, and the shattered mess of his left cheek. She traces a mental hand over the numerous strained muscles and the bruises just beginning to blossom, but leaves them for another day. They won't kill him. The oddly tangled chakra around his eyes and optic nerves is more worrying, but she doesn't have enough information to analyze that right now.

Sakura surfaces, and blinks at the people filling the tiny operating room. Six Anbu, plus Ibiki, Iruka, and Kakashi himself are all sitting or standing around Sasuke's stretcher, waiting for her to finish. "Ah?" she says.

"Haruno Sakura," Kakashi says, eerily formal in his full Hokage regalia. "Report on the physical health of the prisoner and traitor Uchiha Sasuke."

Naruto's hand tightens on Sakura's shoulder. "I keep telling you--" he says, but Iruka tugs him aside and orders him to wait.

Sakura seizes the formality of an after-action report to steady herself. "I repaired the life-threatening wounds and the broken facial bone structure, but not the lesser injuries. The patient will be in considerable pain when he wakes up, but he won't die," she says. "Also, there's something peculiar about his eyes that should be examined in more detail."

Naruto looks down, guiltily. "About that. He-- I think he went blind. At the end. He stopped aiming right, and he didn't even try to block me, which is why I cut him so badly. I didn't mean to. I thought he'd dodge, or catch it, like he always does."

Sakura sits abruptly on the stretcher, not caring that she's squashing Sasuke's feet.

Blind. Sasuke is blind.

He's a prisoner, he hates them, and he's blind.

Naruto brought Sasuke home like he promised. But no one can make time run backward, and some stories never get a perfect ending.

"I can test that," Sakura says, listening to her voice as if someone else is moving her lips and tongue and forcing air through her vocal cords. "It's not hard."

She stands and pries open one of Sasuke's eyelids and fishes a tiny flashlight out of the pouch at her waist. When she shines the light in his face, his pupil doesn't contract.

"No response," she says.

"So he wasn't faking," Ibiki says, grim satisfaction lacing his voice. "That simplifies things. We'll put him in one of the holding cells under heavy wards until his fate is decided." He motions to the Anbu, two of whom pick up Sasuke's body by the shoulders and legs and hold him like a swaying corpse. "I'll give you a daily report," Ibiki tells Kakashi, and then he and the Anbu vanish in a swirl of leaves.

Sakura sits back down on the empty stretcher while Kakashi, Iruka, and the remaining four Anbu file out of the hospital.

After a moment, Naruto sits beside her, his shoulder and thigh just grazing her own. "He hurt two of the people on my team pretty badly," he murmurs. "I should go see how they're doing -- if they're going to live."

"You should," Sakura agrees. "I could ask a nurse."

Neither moves.

They wait, silently, until the sun comes up.

\---------------------------------------------

 **End**


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